Erasmus and European mobility: a strategic investment

While the financing of the Erasmus programme appears under threat, Yves Bertoncini underlines the strategic importance of mobility for European youth, in an interview to be published by Cahiers de l’action, edited by the INJEP. Notre Europe proposes you this interview in preview..

While the financing of the Erasmus programme appears under threat, Yves
Bertoncini underlines the strategic importance of mobility for European youth,
in an interview realised by Hélène Bourgeois and to be published by Cahiers de l’action, edited by the INJEP.

Yves Bertoncini mentions the diversity of the EU mobility programmes,
including the European Voluntary Service, and notes that they have often been
launched on the basis of both political and economic motives.

He also
recalls that it is important to foster youth mobility because it enables the
acquisition of linguistic, intercultural, transversal and international
skills and underlines that public support for such mobility must come both from
the European and the national levels.

He finally suggests several recommendations in favour of mobility, among
which:

– to rely on research on the individual and collective impact of
experiences of mobility and to make it available to children and their families,
so as to stimulate their “desire of mobility”

– to put more money in European programmes, so as to increase the level
of the grants as well as the number of their beneficiaries;

– to put in place more “accompanying elements”, in terms of accommodation,
travel arrangements, or access to a job;

– to widen the panel of possibilities of mobility in terms of duration or duration, promoting more language-learning
trips for example, so as to widen the number of young people concerned.